Early in my career, I focused on the presence of extracellular DNA from cancer cells; electron transfer between reductases and hemoglobin; and mitigation of toxic effects in cancer chemotherapies through the use of dithiocarbamates.

Upon returning to Michigan, I served as the Associate Director of the Barros Research Institute (BRI) for twenty-five years (1985 – 2010) and maintained a fixed-term appointment at MSU within the Chemistry Department. The Institute was founded in 1982 by Dr. Barnett Rosenberg following his discovery of the widely used cisplatin and carboplatin anti-cancer drugs and it operated under a joint agreement with Michigan State University. I was responsible for implementing and coordinating the Institute’s proprietary research activities in the fields of cancer and aging. In the latter half of this 25-year period, the Institute focused on developing and testing biopharmaceutical agents with anti-cancer, anti-viral, and vaccine adjuvant activities. I co-directed the research and oversaw process development, drug production, assay development and validation, QC, QA, toxicology, pre-clinical animal trials, human phase I trials, translational research, IT management, data analyses, and intellectual property disclosures and patents. The Institute closed in 2010 and I transferred to the Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI) at MSU because of my background in T1 translational sciences. In keeping with this background, my academic ties are now with the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology.

I also maintain interest in other diverse areas of research which include: mathematical models of disease-specific mortality; cosmogenic interactions with the biosphere; and the study of variations of activity in the Sun and the interplanetary magnetic fields. I have published several articles in each of these areas.

Current Research

My current research is in the area of biomedical informatics. MSU has a research partnership with the Michigan Pain Consultants (MPC) of Grand Rapids allowing access to their community-based practice data. The overall goal of this project is to create a knowledge base to support pain research and to drive clinical decision support for supplementary diagnostic and treatment advice in chronic pain management. Working with collaborators from MPC and MSU, I am leading the efforts to build a person-in-pain phenotype model which will be linked to treatment outcomes. This is based on the assumption that the structured data of patient-reported outcomes and unstructured clinical progress notes can provide sufficient examples of the symptom-to-outcome trajectory to allow construction of phenotypes and mapping to outcomes. Using psychometric tools and natural language processing, our team will build models and test predictions to evaluate whether community medical practices can provide evidence-generating medicine to underpin the development of evidence-based practice tuned to the community setting.

Juckett, D.A. and Rosenberg, B. Periodic clustering of human disease-specific mortality distributions by shape and time position, and a new integer-based law of mortality. Mech. Ageing Dev.1990, 55:255. PMID: 2232917

Contributions

My career has been diverse, ranging from cancer and aging research to solar physics, biospheric effects of radiation, and epidemiological evidence for epigenetic effects in disease. Interwoven with these research interests has been proprietary work in the discovery and development of bio-therapeutics. In each of these areas I have made modest contributions.

In the field of cancer, I worked on changes in cell surfaces that occur with cisplatin treatment. This work was part of a small field of investigators that were documenting nucleic acids on the surface of cells. At the time, the power of DNA analysis was not available, nor the potential of the importance of non-coding DNA in cell functioning. This was some of the early work that suggested cells were exchanging DNA. In later years, our proprietary work the Barros Research Institute led to some publications on cancer immunotherapy and the discovery of the first innate immune stimulator from a protozoan.

Early in my career I also collaborated with Barnett Rosenberg on theoretical work in the field of aging and mortality. We discovered a new mathematical relationship linking combinatoric principles to steps in a rare event sequence that had as its asymptotic limit such extreme-value distributions as the Weibull (Gumbel) and Gompertz equations. During this work, we also discovered interesting integer-based relationships among disease prevalence that are still unexplained to this day.

During our exploration of human disease-specific mortality and population longevity, we noticed a strong relationship between human longevity and cancer mortality to variations in the flux of cosmic rays in the environment. This was the first strong evidence that low-level cosmic ray radiation may have an influence on the germ line. It was also among the first indirect evidence for mother and grandmother effects affecting cancer mortality. The implication of these findings was that an epigenetic effect was operating to cause the fluctuations. This has profound implications for the amount of information passing between generations and is a warning for any space colonization efforts to locations unprotected from the cosmic ray background – such as Mars or the Moon.

As a result of my work on the influence of solar-modulated cosmic ray fluxes on the biosphere, I built on my background in physics and became involved in exploring the unexplained oscillations of the Sun. This generated several significant contributions. I was the first to document a 17-year cycle in the interplanetary magnetic field, which likely originates in the open field regions of the solar surface. I also worked with Charles Wolff of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center to show that his theory of coupled g-modes for the interior of the Sun has supportive evidence within the observable oscillations in the solar surface sunspot patterns.

After leaving the Barros Research Institute and joining the Clinical & Translational Sciences Institute at MSU, I have begun using my analytical skill to explore the development of pain phenotypes. This has involved the field of natural language processing. I was the first to publish a paper to determine the size needed for a gold standard corpus. My current work continues in this field, with the goal of transforming the patient and provider perspectives of a large community pain management service into a clinical decision support tool for the primary care setting.